lined in his book
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim:
"In Gestalt therapy we don't interpret dreams. We do something much more interesting with them. Instead of analyzing and further cutting up the dream, we want to bring it back to life. And the way to bring it back to life is to re-live the dream as if it were happening now. Instead of telling the dream as if it were a story of the past, act it out in the present, so that it becomes a part of yourself, so that you are really involved.
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Expanding on Jung's theories, Perls suggested that every part of a dream, every detail, every character, is actually a part of the dreamer him- or herself. He described the sometimes warring factions within a dream as parts of the self that are in conflict, and suggested that dreamers use dream reenactment to learn to "own" these parts of themselves, integrating their personalities into a more comfortable whole. (Chapter 6 describes several techniques for acting out a dream.) "If you understand what you can do with dreams," he wrote, "you can do a tremendous lot for yourself on your own." For Perls, outside interpreters such as psychoanalysts who suggest or impose interpretations could not possibly be as accurate as the dreamers themselves.
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Other Experiential and Alternative Theories
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Over the years, interest in dream theory has grown, and there are now hundreds of groups of dreamworkers, both professional and amateur. As a result, there are many schools of thought regarding dreams, and many of these are quite unlike those of Freud. Some of these dreamworkers, such as Arnold Mindell, actually refuse to even define what a dream is, except to say that it is "an experience happening to a sleeping person." Whatever happens beyond that, he says, is a matter of opinion: "So I listen and look
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